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Beyond Parish Boundaries: Black Catholics and the Quest for Racial Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Karen J. Johnson
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Abstract

According to most historians, the majority of northern urban Catholics before Vatican II (1962–1965) were ensconced in their parish boundaries, viewing their existence through the lens of the parish and focusing the majority of their attention on matters within their particular geographic location. As African Americans moved north during the Great Migration (1910s–1960s) and the racial dynamics of cities changed, some black Catholics began to organize for what they called “interracial justice,” a term that reflected their belief that black equality would benefit African Americans and whites. This article argues that the parish boundaries paradigm for understanding Catholicism prior to the reforms of Vatican II fails to account for the efforts of black Catholics working for interracial justice. This article considers four ways black Catholic interracialists moved beyond their parish boundaries: (a) the national networks they cultivated with white priests; (b) the theological doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ they used to support their work; (c) the local relationships they developed with non-Catholics; and (d) the connections they made with young white Catholics. By advancing this argument, this essay highlights the relationship between race and religion—both how the institutional Catholic church reinforced racial hierarchies and how black Catholics leveraged their faith to tear them down. Finally, this article reorients the history of Catholic interracialism by focusing on black laypeople and connects two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: that of Catholicism and the long civil rights movement.

Keywords

Black CatholicsInterracialCivil Rights MovementChicagoAfrican American
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , Summer 2015 , pp. 264 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2015

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References

Notes

1. Marilyn Nickels and David Southern have produced the most extensive narratives of the conflict with the FCC. See Nickels, Marilyn, Black Catholic Protest and the Federated Colored Catholics, 1917–1933: Three Perspectives on Racial Justice (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988);Google Scholar Nickels, Marilyn W., “Thomas Wyatt Turner and the Federated Colored Catholics,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7, (1988), 215–32;Google Scholar Southern, John, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 1911–1963 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).Google Scholar See also Dolan, Jay, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1985), 368–69;Google Scholar Ochs, Stephen, Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Priests, 1871–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 221–27.Google Scholar

2. In 1938, Chicago was home to about sixteen thousand black Catholics, and a report that year estimated that the population of black Catholics had doubled since 1930, mostly due to the draw of Catholic schools. See Sanders, James W., The Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 215.Google Scholar

3. Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 144.

4. The Jesuits, in particular, helped black Catholics’ efforts for racial justice, or what came to be called interracial justice because it would benefit white and black Americans, although their support for civil rights varied. See Anderson, R. Bentley, Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947–1956 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism.

5. McGreevy, John T., Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar On the Catholic encounter with race in the South, which was much more diffused and not centered on the parish, see Moore, Andrew, The South's Tolerable Alien (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).Google Scholar For another conflict with McGreevy's paradigm that uses Bishop Bernard Sheil's Catholic Youth Organization as its basis to show the ways Catholics of all races and ethnicities crossed parish boundaries, see Neary, Timothy, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries: African Americans and Interracial Catholic Social Action in Chicago, 1914–1954” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University, 2004).Google Scholar

6. For the growing body of literature on the intersection of race and religion in American history nationally and outside the South in particular, see, for instance, Barrett, James R., The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin, 2012);Google Scholar Blum, Edward and Harvey, Paul, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012);Google Scholar Evans, Curtis J., “White Evangelical Protestant Responses to the Civil Rights Movement,” Harvard Theological Review 102, (2009): 245–73;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hawkins, J. Russell and Sinitiere, Philip Luke, Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Jones, Patrick, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009);Google Scholar Kidd, Colin, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Noll, Mark, God and Race in American History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

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8. For a history of black Protestant migrant constructions of sacred space, see Best, Wallace D., Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).Google Scholar For other work on black Catholics, see Blatnica, Dorothy Ann, “At the Altar of Their God”: African American Catholics in Cleveland, 1922–1961 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995);Google Scholar Davis, Cyprian, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1990);Google Scholar Hayes, Diana L. and Davis, Cyprian, eds., Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1998)Google Scholar; MacGregor, Morris J., The Emergence of a Black Catholic Community: St. Augustine's in Washington (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1999);Google Scholar McDonough, Gary Wray, Black and Catholic in Savannah, Georgia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993);Google Scholar McMahon, Eileen M., What Parish Are You From? A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995);Google Scholar Neary, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries,”; O'Toole, James M., Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002);Google Scholar Tristano, Richard M., “Holy Family Parish: The Genesis of an African-American Catholic Community in Natchez, Mississippi,” Journal of Negro History 83, (Autumn, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Nickels places the blame for the split on Markoe's shoulders, but Southern argues that LaFarge engineered the takeover in power. LaFarge, Southern argues, was not as concerned as Markoe about whether the organization would be a black organization or an integrated organization. LaFarge's concern was one of clerical versus lay control.

10. For more on Falls, see Rice, Lincoln, “Confronting the Heresy of the ‘Mythical Body of Christ’: The Life of Dr. Arthur Falls,” American Catholic Studies 123, (Summer 2012);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rice, Lincoln, “Healing the Racial Divide: A Catholic Racial Justice Framework Inspired by Dr. Arthur A. Falls,” (Eugene, O.R.: Wipf and Stock, 2014);Google Scholar Falls, Arthur, Memoir Manuscript, Marquette University Archives, Milwaukee, Wis. (hereafter cited as MUA);Google Scholar Falls, Arthur, Arthur Falls Unpublished Autobiography, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, New York.Google Scholar The page numbers I use for the MUA Falls Memoirs Manuscript are my own because of how they were organized at the MUA when I accessed them in 2011.

11. Southern, LaFarge, John and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism; Anderson, Black, White, and Catholic, 14, 62 Google Scholar; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 41–47.

12. The national Federation grew out of the black Catholic Congress movement, which Daniel Rudd initiated in 1888. See Davis, , The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 171–94;Google Scholar Agee, Gary B., A Cry for Justice: Daniel Rudd and His life in Black Catholicism, Journalism, and Activism, 1854–1933 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 179–90; Southern, Lafarge, John and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 141.Google Scholar

13. Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 133. Rev. John T. Gillard, a Josephite priest who did not like the Federation, accused the Federation of overestimating its membership. See Nickels, Black Catholic Protest and the Federated Colored Catholic, vi, For more on the conflict between the Federation and the Josephites, see Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 246–320.

14. For a brief biography of Markoe, see Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 221–25; Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 109–13.

15. William M. Markoe, S.J., “The St. Elizabeth's Chronicle,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, March 1928.

16. William M. Markoe, S.J., “Our Jim Crow Federation,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, July 1930.

17. Federated Colored Catholics of Chicago, “Recommendations of the Federated Colored Catholics of Chicago. Changes in the Revised Constitution Submitted by the Committee on the Revision of the Constitution,” n.d., in Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers, Moorland- Spingarn Research Center, Washington, D.C (hereafter cited as MSRC).

18. “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, October 1932.

19. Quoted in Nickels, Black Catholic Protest and the Federated Colored Catholics, 110. One Chicago leader, C. J. Foster, supported Turner and did not vote to remove him from office at the meeting. Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 134–35.

20. “Chicago Chapter News,” Interracial Review (May 1933).

21. Arthur Falls to Mr. Priest, April 23, 1936, General Correpondence, Incoming by Correspondent, 1933–, Dorothy Day Catholic Worker New York Catholic Worker Records, MUA.

22. Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998);Google Scholar McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, chap. 1. Allan Spear argues that prior to the Great Migration, there was a relatively fluid pattern of race relations in Chicago, but by 1890 or so, a separate black Chicago began to develop. As the black population increased during the Great Migration, white Chicagoans forcibly contained black Chicagoans in a physical ghetto and black Chicagoans responded by creating their own institutional ghetto. The Great Migration ultimately reinforced patterns already in place. Spear, Allan H., Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar For more on the Great Migration, see Baldwin, Davarian L., Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);Google Scholar St. Drake, Clair and Cayton, Horace R., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);Google Scholar Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar

23. For more on Mundelein, see Kantowicz, Edward R., Corporation Sole: Cardinal Mundelein and Chicago Catholicism, Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).Google Scholar

24. See Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 83–94.Google Scholar Cohen emphasizes that although Mundelein tried to Americanize his parishioners, many, particularly the Italians and Poles, resisted. Mundelein's actions reflected the mood of the sons and daughters of new immigrants who were learning to discriminate against black people from old immigrants, like Chicago's Irish. See Barrett, The Irish Way, 47–50.

25. Archbishop George Mundelein to J.A. Burgmer, SVD, “Letter in Favor of the Negro Parish of St. Monica,” in Two Crowded Years: Being Selected Addresses, Pastorals, and Letters Issued during the First Twenty-Four Months of the Episcopate of the Most Rev. Mundelein, George William, D.D., as Archbishop of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Extension Press, 1918).Google Scholar

26. Anderson, Black, White, and Catholic, 3–8; Bennett, , Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 162–228;Google Scholar Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 365–68; Labbé, Delores, Jim Crow Comes to Church (New York: Arno Press, 1978).Google Scholar

27. Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 208–9; Anderson, Black, White, and Catholic, 4–7.; Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 162–228.

28. Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 245–57; Brandewie, Ernest, In the Light of the Word: Divine Word Missionaries of North America (New York: Orbis Books, 2000).Google Scholar

29. Hoy, Suellen, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago's Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 92.Google Scholar

30. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 380. See also Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 200, on how the use of missionary orders to minister to black Catholics implied AfricanAmericans’ lowliness.

31. Mundelein to Burgmer, “Letter in Favor of the Negro Parish of St. Monica, Chicago.”

32. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 179–93.

33. An Address to the Archbishop of Chicago Protesting Against the Policy of Segregation in the Administration of the Affairs of St. Monica, December 7, 1917, Madaj Collection, Archdiocese of Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernard in Archives and Record Center, Chicago, Ill. (hereafter cited as AAC). The letter should be in the archive, but it was lost so I was unable to read it while doing research. See Neary, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries,” 38–39, for context.

34. “St. Monica's Church Again the Scene of Discrimination,” The Chicago Defender, November 17, 1917.

35. Pullman Porters Review Editor to Mundelein, November 13, 1917, Madaj Collection, AAC.

36. Chancellor to Madden, December 11, 1917, Madaj Collection, AAC.

37. Mundelein to Rev. L. J. Welbers, February 11, 1918, Madaj Collection, AAC.

38. William Prater to Thomas Wyatt Turner, April 7, 1927, Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers, MSRC.

39. In 1930, 93 of Chicago's 253 parishes had schools. Sanders, The Education of an Urban Minority, 4, 14.

40. For more on the nuns serving black populations, see Hoy, Good Hearts, 71–102.

41. For politics of civility and politics of protest, see Beth Bates, Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bates looks at Chicago's black community's shift from civility to protest based on developments in the labor movement led by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

42. Margaret Cope, “Catholic Education for Our Youth,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, November 1930.

43. For more on Eckert, see Brandewie, In the Light of the Word, 196–203.

44. Neary, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries,” chap. 2. Many of those conversions came as a result of the school the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament ran, as Eckert knew well. Eckert valued the sisters’ work so much that he recruited them to St. Anselm's when he was transferred there. See Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts, 96. From 1922 to 1925, St. Elizabeth's parish operated a dual system of education, segregating the white from the black students. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament taught black children while the Mercy sisters taught the white children. See Koenig, Harry C., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago (Chicago: Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980), 245–52.Google Scholar

45. Quoted in Nickels, “Thomas Wyatt Turner and the Federated Colored Catholics,” 166. For a discussion of Markoe's work in America, see Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 305; Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 111–12.

46. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 384–85. Falls further commented that other black Catholics who did not attend St. Elizabeth's agreed with his assessment of Eckert, who is usually praised for his work among African Americans.

47. For more on racial uplift, see Gaines, Kevin Kelly, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, December 1929; “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, April 1931.

49. “St. Elizabeth's Church Destroyed by Fire,” St. Elizabeth’s Chronicle, February 1930.

50. “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, June 1931.

51. Sanders, The Education of an Urban Minority, 214–15. See also the entries on these parishes in Koenig, A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

52. “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, December 1929.

53. Koenig, A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago; 72–75, 216–19.

54. Quoted in Hazel McDaniel Teaubeau, “Seventh Annual Convention of the Federated Colored Catholics Surpasses All Previous Meetings,” St. Elizabeth's Chronical, October 1931, 606.

55. Maude Johnston to Thomas Wyatt Turner, July 24, 1931, Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers, MSRC.

56. Quoted in Nickels, “Thomas Wyatt Turner and the Federated Colored Catholics,” 11.

57. Thomas Wyatt Turner to Maude Johnston, August 4, 1931, Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers, MSRC.

58. For more on Loyola University, see Skerrett, Ellen, Born in Chicago: A History of Chicago's Jesuit University (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 2008).Google Scholar

59. Koenig, A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago, 367–82; “Our Contributors,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, April 1931; “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, August 1931; “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, March 1932. St. Joseph's school was closed from 1931 to 1933 to prevent black children from enrolling in it. St. Joseph's remained a separate place of worship within Holy Family parish for black Catholics until the late 1950s.

60. Southern, John Lafarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 72; Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 318–19. The first black priest in the nation, who was recognized as black, was Augustus Tolton who served in Chicago from 1889 until his death in 1897 when he was only forty three years old. See Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 152–62. In 1932, there were only four black priests serving in the United States, but when Father Stephen L. Theobald of St. Paul, Minnesota, died in 1932 and Charles Randolph Uncles died in 1933, the number of active priests dropped to two. Theobald had been involved in the FCC. Only in the 1940s did the number of black priests ordained increase substantially. See Nickels, , “Thomas Wyatt Turner and the Federated Colored Catholics,” 13, 78, 94;Google Scholar Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 318–19. In 1940, Vincent Smith came to Chicago to serve at St. Elizabeth's parish, breaking the moratorium. See McDannell, Colleen, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 254–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 391.

62. Ibid., 383.

63. Ibid., 384.

64. Ibid., 635.

65. For more on the functions of corporate public displays of faith, see Orsi, Robert, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

66. Teaubeau, “Seventh Annual Convention of the Federated Colored Catholics Surpasses All Previous Meetings,” 605. Teaubeau's reference to the Knights of Columbus Zouvaves was likely the Knights' drill team. See Kauffman, Christopher J., Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 404.Google Scholar Although it was unofficial, the Knights of Columbus largely discriminated against African Americans through their blackballing policy, which allowed only five members of a local council to vote “no” on a candidate’s membership. In the 1920s, though, they did counter nativism with a series of books trying to promote different races' contributions to the United States and included African Americans. W. E. B. DuBois wrote The Gift of Black Folk for the series and praised the Knights as contrasting the general thrust of Catholicism's segregation, particularly in schools. See Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, 285–86. In 1959, LaFarge critiqued the Knights of Columbus, and only in 1963, after an incident in Chicago in which a black candidate was refused admission to the Knights and six local officials quit in protest did the order change its admissions policy. See Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, 412–13, 416–17. Chicago's Catholic Interracial Council worked hard to integrate their local order because among Chicago's 48,000 Knights of Columbus members, none were known to be black. See Mathew Ahmann to Daniel Cantwell, n.d., Folder December 27–31, 1959, Box 33, Catholic Interracial Council Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Ill. (hereafter cited as CHM); Minutes of Board of Directors Meeting, May 15, 1957, Folder May 15–31, 1957, Box 17, Catholic Interracial Council Papers, CHM; Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, n.d., Folder September 18–30, 1957, Box 19, Catholic Interracial Council Papers, CHM. The White Friends of Colored Catholics formed in 1931 in St. Louis when a group of white Catholics asked Markoe, who pastored St. Elizabeth's Church for black Catholics, if they could integrate into St. Elizabeth's activities while remaining members of their home parishes. See Nickels, , Black Catholic Protest and the Federated Colored Catholics, 77, 186.Google Scholar The Josephites and the FCC were at odds with one another throughout the FCC's history. Both LaFarge and Turner gave Gillard's 1930 The Catholic Church and the American Negro scathing reviews. See Ochs, Desegregating the Altar, 285–87, 299–304.

67. See Schultz, Kevin, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Google Scholar

68. “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, February, 1932.

69. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 394.

70. See Davis, , The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 218;Google Scholar Reed, Touré F., Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 5.Google Scholar

71. Arthur Falls, Oral History Interview, 1990, Interviewed by Rosalie Troester, MUA.

72. See Avella, Steven M., “The Rise and Fall of Bernard Sheil,” in Catholicism, Chicago Style, ed. Kantowicz, Edward R., Skerrett, Ellen, and Avella, Steven M. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1993);Google Scholar Duquinn, Lorene Hanley, They Called Her the Baroness: The Life of Catherine De Hueck Doherty (Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 2000), 200–204;Google Scholar Neary, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries.”

73. “Chicago Chapter News,” St. Elizabeth Chronicle, October 1932.

74. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity.

75. For more on the Urban League's Interracial Commission, see Folders I-9 (1929) CUL Report, I-10 (1932) CUL report, I-11 (1933) CUL report, I-12 (1936) Two Decades of Service, I-13 (1938) CUL Report I, Box 1, Series 1, Chicago Urban League Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Ill.

76. Black Catholics who did not participate in the colored parishes founded FCC branches in their local parishes, like Falls did at Our Lady of Solace.

77. Maude Johnston to Thomas Wyatt Turner, January 12, 1932, Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers, MSRC.

78. Falls, Oral History Interview, 4.

79. For more on the black theological tradition of protest, see Bennet, , Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 5;Google Scholar Davis, , The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 189.Google Scholar

80. Falls, Arthur, “Colored Churches,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle February, 1932, 26.Google Scholar

81. By the 1950s, Catholic theology books used in seminars and colleges addressed racism, but in the 1930s they did not. See Ochs, , Desegregating the Altar, 222.Google Scholar

82. Cassius Foster, “A Distinct Need for Catholic Action,” St. Elizabeth's Chronicle, July 1932, 135, 138.

83. In doing so, activists continued the tradition of African Americans from the nineteenth-century black caucuses who were developing what Cyprian Davis called an “incipient black Catholic theology of Church” in which the church “preserves the deposit of faith because it teaches the doctrine of the equality of all peoples before God” and must “denounce racism within the church because it goes contrary to authentic Catholic belief and morality.” See Davis, , The History of Black Catholics in the United States, 189.Google Scholar

84. Mundelein to Burgmer, “Letter in Favor of the Negro Parish of St. Monica.” Emphasis added.

85. Arthur Falls, “Honesty in Race Relations,” Interracial Review, September 1933, 158–59. Italics in original.

86. Sheen, Fulton, The Mystical Body of Christ (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), 80.Google Scholar

87. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 566–67.

88. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 388–417.

89. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 566–67.

90. Sister Cecilia Himebaugh to Dom Virgil Michel, August 6, 1935, CISCA Papers, Loyola University Chicago Archives, Chicago, Ill.

91. Falls, Memoir Manuscript, 564–65.

92. For LaFarge's CIC, see Martin Zielinski, “Working for Interracial Justice: The Catholic Interracial Council of New York, 1934–1964,” U.S. Catholic Historian, (1988). Of the national Federation, Southern says, “The organization simply evaporated in the late 1930s.” Southern, LaFarge, John and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 146.Google Scholar

93. Arthur Falls, “Interracial Cooperation in Chicago,” Interracial Review, June 1935.

94. Arthur Falls, “Interracial Cooperation in Chicago,” Interracial Review, August 1935.

95. Arthur Falls to Mr. Priest, March 14, 1946, General Correpondence, Incoming by Correspondent, 1933–, Dorothy Day Catholic Worker New York Catholic Worker Records, MUA.

96. Piehl, SeeMel, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982);Google Scholar Francis. Sicius, J., “The Chicago Catholic Worker,” in A Revolution of the Heart, ed. Coy, Patrick G. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 337–62;Google Scholar Sicius, Francis J., The Word Made Flesh: The Chicago Catholic Worker and the Emergence of Lay Activism in the Church (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990).Google Scholar

97. For more on Chicago's liberal Catholics, see Avella, Steven M., This Confident Church: Catholic Leadership and Life in Chicago, 1940–1965 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992);Google Scholar Paul T. Murray, “From the Sidelines to the Frontlines: Mathew Ahmann Leads American Catholics into the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (forthcoming); Elizabeth Louise Sharum, “A Strange Fire Burning: A History of the Friendship House Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1977); Duquinn, The Called Her the Baronness; Karen Johnson, “The Universal Church in the Segregated City: Doing Catholic Interracialism in Chicago, 1915–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Ilinois at Chicago, 2013). Friendship House and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ), which united CICs across the nation, were the most prominent national organizations. See Friendship House Papers, CHM; Catholic Interracial Council Papers, CHM; Friendship House Papers, Madonna House Archives, Combermere, Ontario, Canada; National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Papers, MUA.

98. Southern, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 143.

99. Cassius Foster to Edward Marciniak, January 16, 1945, Folder 1, Box 1, Catholic Interracial Council Papers, CHM. See also Daniel Cantwell Papers, CHM.

100. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 424–26.

101. Wuthnow, Robert, Restructuring American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

102. For the support for the long civil rights movement, see, for example, Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, (2005): 1233–63;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Korstad, Robert and Lichtenson, Nelson, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 786–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For refutations of the long civil rights movement idea, see, for example, Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita and Lang, Clarence, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, (Spring 2007);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Arnesen, Eric, “Reconsidering the Long Civil Rights Movement,” Historically Speaking, 10, (2009): 31–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Scholars who have looked at religion in conjunction with civil rights outside the modern civil rights era include: Anderson, Black, White and Catholic; Harvey, Paul, Freedom's Coming (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);CrossRefGoogle Scholar McGreevy, , Parish Boundaries; Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009);Google Scholar Southern, , John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism; Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).Google Scholar

103. Anderson, Black, White, and Catholic, xiii; Massingale, Bryan, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 50–55.Google Scholar

104. In 1968, for instance, fifty-eight black priests of the Black Clergy Caucus proclaimed the Catholic church to be a “white racist institution.” See Davis, , History of Black Catholics in the United States, 87;Google Scholar Ochs, , Desegregating the Altar, 7;Google Scholar Sanders, Katrina M., “Black Catholic Clergy and the Struggle for Civil Rights: Winds of Change,” in Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience, ed. M. Shawn Copeland (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2009), 78–93.Google Scholar For a sustained critique of the Catholic church from a black priest from this generation, see Lucas, Lawrence, Black Priest/White Church: Catholics and Racism (New York: Random House, 1970).Google Scholar